Was just looking at Paul Lamere’s list of accepted papers for the ISMIR conference and they are amazing. The academics are once again showing the executives how innovative thinking can move the industry towards solving users practical problems and create new business opportunities along the way.

At least the academics have really begun to build the tools that will make the celestial jukebox and unlimited music locker a commercially viable and practical product. Which is kinda funny when you think about it because thats actually the job of the Harvard MBA’s in the executives suites collecting big checks. If you work in or around media, these are the papers you should probably read and use to guide your thinking about the industry. Marketing, especially for media, will be largely algorithmic and these are some of the early experiments in creating the algorithms that will result in discovery and hopefully sales.

The papers that look the most promising:
– A Comparison Of Signal-Based Music Recognitionmmendation to Genre Labels, Collaborative Filtering, Musicological Analysis, Human Recommendation, and Random Baseline Terence Magno and Carl Sable

An interesting article from the good folks at TorrentFreak. While it wont have any of the humor and fireworks ThePirateBay brings to the party, I still think this will be an interesting battle. Mininova doesnt run a tracker or host files it is truly only pointing in the general direction of both legal and questionable torrent files. However the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BRIEN disagrees.<Insert trite music industry is doomed comment here> blah </insert>

I noticed that the article keeps referencing the DMCA, which as a US law and as such probably has little applicability as a defense in a Dutch courtroom. Hope the folks at MiniNova have a better battle plan up their sleeve then “we kinda follow a fuzzy US law”. The Dutch agency persuing the case counts among is success forcing Demonoid offline for a couple of months and getting them to move their popular bitTorrent tracker to a different ISP.<Insert music industry loves whack-a-mole comment here> blah </insert>

There are some folks, Andrew Keen comes to mind, who are easy to dismiss not because of the sensational and contrarian nature of their ideas but because of the lack of thought and discussion that surrounds them. Contrast this with Kevin Kelly who wrote 1,000 True Fans back in March and ignited the the echo chamber we lovingly call the Blogosphere with his suggestion that with a 1,000 true fans supporting them an artist could live exclusively from their craft.

The idea is not without its detractors, Jaron Lanier of Digital Moaism fame (summerized back in ’06), being the most prominent. However, unlike Andrew Keen who goes into Fox News styled apoplectic fits (more) when there is disagreement, Kevin Kelly has opened his blog to highlight the arguments against his meme. In posts last week and again today, Kelly has highlighted variations of and arguments against his meme. While remaining steadfastly committed to the idea of a 1,000 (or perhaps 5,000) true fans, Kelly is has taken up the challenge of proving his ideas right. He is on a quest to find 3 artist that make a “predictable income sufficient to raise a child.” If he cant, then the 1,000 true fans meme will be declared officially dead and Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen and the terrorist will have won.

Last week the RIAA was cheering the destruction of million CD and DVD taken from flea market vendors and church swap meets across the country. This week it put out the numbers of CD’s shipped from its client record labels to music stores and they arent good. The ailing music industry shipped 17.5% fewer CD’s to record stores in ’07 than it did in ’06. Of course, much of what was shipped to the stores is still sitting in discount bins so the actual sales decline is surely much worse. Across all physical formats, CD singles (up 50%), Cassettes (down 41%), LP’s (up 36%) etc… shipments were down 16.9% Y/Y.

I’m not the sharpest tack in the marble box but if I wwas an exec in a failing $10 billion industry that had shrunk by more then $2 billion in the last year with shipments down 19%, the last thing I’d do is sue a company that lets my customers discover and buy my product. Call me crazy.

Apple’s ubiquitous iPod was built to ensure that listeners could not easily pass their music between devices. The iPod and iTunes combination leads to a very solitary musical experience with users only able to share music by jumping through technical hoops. The annoyance factor with sharing digital music was intentionally high. However, where ever there are digital roadblocks, there is an entrepreneur ready to remove them (for a small fee).

Yesterday I got an email from Michael Robertson of MP3tunes, personally asking me for help (yeahwerethatclose). You see, MP3tunes is being sued by EMI music for making it easy for people to store and access legally purchased music online. The labels are arguing that ripping a CD and uploading it for storage is tantamount to distributing it and is therefore illegal. Rebuffed by the courts in March, EMI is undetered and Michael says the labels efforts to sue his company out of existence is causing him major agita. Michael doesnt want me to write my congressperson or file an amicus brief on his behalf, what he really wants from me is Money. In the letter, apparently sent at random to conencted to the Interwebs, Michael has two request: 1) people upgrade their free MP3tunes accounts to the premium level. 2) blog about his plight. I’ve held a premium account for close to two years (Michael you need a better database marketing system) and I’ve now blogged about it so I consider my obligation fulfilled. Full email from Michael after the jump.

The once haughty recorded music industry has finally collapsed under the weight of its own greed and inefficiency. We can officially call the industry dead, not when the companies are shuttered (because a number of them will survive), but when their main business model is radically different. According to an article in todays Financial Times the music industry is edging ever closer to signing a deal with Apple Computers which may do just that.

The article discusses a deal the two sides are trying to hammer out to shift the labels economics from collecting money based on the number of songs/CD’s that are sold to collecting money based on the number of iPod’s or iPhone’s thats are sold. Its a complex deal that the article emphasizes may not get done, however for the labels to even consider it highlights how very desperate they’ve become. This deal would certainly spell the end of the traditional record labels as their status as added value intermediaries (ie important middlemen) fades even further. Also read a related article which is a bit of a counter-point to the first article albeit with little new information.